The Cusanus Game

  The establishment was almost empty. It seemed to have seen better days, but it looked cozy. In the back, next to the entrance to the kitchen, was a man-sized grandfather clock with a semicircular top and a face made of wrought brass. The hands pointed to a quarter to six.

  The owner, a round, almost bald man, emerged from the kitchen and raised his fleshy paw in greeting. He wore a shirt with wide armholes and had tied an ugly gray plastic apron around his belly, on which blood and the remains of fish innards were stuck.

  “Hello, Frans!” he exclaimed. “Where did you find this pretty little angel?”

  “She only recently came down from the sky, and is named Domenica.”

  “Hello, Domenica. Good evening.”

  The owner returned to the kitchen, warbling to himself. A young woman served us. She had black-painted lips and short hair dyed carrot-red, which looked like the plastic fur of a cuddly toy. Her black jeans stretched across her ample behind.

  When we had eaten our pasta, the owner came to our table and greeted us with a handshake. His plump face shone; on his pale forehead below his receding hairline beads of sweat stood close together like bloated transparent leeches.

  “I assume you will have the fish I recommend to you as always,” he said to Frans, giving him a friendly pat on the shoulder. “Today I have something very special for you.”

  He went into the kitchen and came back with a greasy plastic bag. He had put on a pair of kitchen gloves. Carefully he pulled out a fish about a foot long and placed it in front of Frans on a napkin.

  “Look at this beautiful lucerna,” he said. “Would you rather have it grilled or steamed?”

  The fish was still alive, but its movements were somehow limited. It didn’t wriggle, as one expects from freshly caught fish, but writhed sluggishly, as if in slow motion. The young woman who was about to set our table let out a soft cry, dropped the little basket of bread and utensils on the table, and strode hurriedly to the entrance on her platform shoes.

  “Stay here!” the owner shouted brusquely.

  She stopped, but remained at the door.

  The fish’s dorsal fin was erect and looked like a serrated blade. It emitted a soft groan that sounded almost like a grumble. I extended a finger.

  “Don’t touch!” Frans said hastily.

  He himself seemed to have no inhibition, pulled a small knife with a curved blade from his pocket, flipped it open, and positioned the fish in front of him. The gills opened and closed in a slowed-down rhythm. The mouth worked hard; the eyes were clouded by a gray-white haze. Frans stuck the blade in under the gills. The body tissue visibly resisted his efforts, even though the knife seemed to be very sharp. At first blood still came out, but at the belly the flesh seemed to have the consistency of hard rubber and farther back of synthetic resin, which a knife could no longer handle. Frans’s fingers and the blade were covered with a glittering film, which was reminiscent of gold leaf particles.

  Smiling to himself, the owner had followed his efforts. “Well,” he said. “Isn’t it a fine specimen?”

  Some of the patrons who had since arrived had approached our table and were watching. Their faces reflected a mixture of repugnance and curiosity.

  “You’re making a real mess here with that nano stuff for your restauratio,” said the owner.

  An old man with a white mustache nodded grimly.

  Frans rubbed together the tips of his thumb and forefinger, with which he had held the fish in place, as if he were checking whether his skin was already forming a hardening layer as well. His fingers looked as if they were gilded.

  “Programming glitches can occur and mutations can always occur, Paolo,” he replied. “The NNTR made that clear from the beginning. The city council assessed the risk and agreed. Didn’t it?”

  “The city council,” one of the patrons snorted disdainfully. “That pack of good-for-nothings!”

  “All bought by the Japanese,” another grumbled.

  “The Japs shouldn’t even bother to show their faces around here. I’ll throw them out,” the owner asserted.

  “They have no business here. That’s the truth,” someone said, and several others expressed their support: “Absolutely! You’re right, Paolo!”

  “Don’t be unfair, people,” said Frans. “The scientists are doing their best. The water of the lagoon is still quite dirty. Things like this can happen. It’s unavoidable. Most of the mutants are harmless, but there are now and then aberrations—”

  “Aberrations!” The old man with the white mustache snorted angrily; he turned around to his wife over his shoulder and grumbled: “He said ‘aberrations,’ did you hear?”

  “—which are capable of turning a healthy lucerna into a polymeric imitation wood.”

  “Or worse!” grumbled the old man, defiantly striking the floor with his cane.

  “Enzo,” his wife admonished softly.

  “Polymeric imitation wood,” murmured the owner, poking the fish, which despite its opened abdominal cavity was still writhing sluggishly. “If only it were real gold. I paid cash for it.”

  “The fish dies of internal ossification,” Frans told me. “While its body goes through an astonishing transubstantiation from a living organism into a practically indestructible artifact.”

  “Then bring this artifact to the Japs, so that they can break their teeth on it,” said Paolo.

  I remembered the paperweight I had seen on Falcotti’s desk at the university in Rome. Hadn’t he said that a friend had brought it back for him from Venice?

  “And what was with that boy in the spring?” the old man asked; he raised his voice and struck the table leg with his cane. “Did he undergo an astonishing transubstantiation too?”

  “Enzo,” his wife moaned. “Please!”

  But he continued undeterred and snorted: “The little one was dead in an hour!” His wife placed her hand calmingly on his arm, but he shook it off. “That’s a load of crap!”

  “That was a real killer,” Frans conceded. “It took the boy’s life.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” the old man said to me. “That’s exactly right.”

  The waitress peered with horror over three tables at the fish, whose mouth opened and closed in slow motion. Frans wrapped it in the napkin and pushed it aside.

  “And who will pay me for it?” asked the owner, gesturing to it with a nod.

  “The NNTR will pay you ten times what you paid for it,” said Frans.

  “I don’t want anything from them.”

  “Be sensible. It’s important for the research, so that at least this mutation doesn’t occur again in the future.”

  “Then take it with you. I’ll give it to you as a gift.”

  “And tell those Japs, young man, to make sure that face no longer appears over Murano,” said the old man with the mustache. “Why do they do that? The Austrians won’t stand by and watch much longer. They’ll bomb us.”

  “Come now, Enzo.”

  “They’ve bombed Venice before,” he snapped at his wife. “They were aiming for Santa Lucia. Did they hit it? Of course not. Instead of the train station those idiots damaged Gli Scalzi.”

  He pursed his lips as if to spit.

  His wife grabbed him by the sleeve and tried halfheartedly to pull him away, but he stood like a statue.

  “The Austrians won’t put up with that indefinitely. Take it from me. They won’t hesitate for long. With that monkey making grimaces at them, that grinning gook? They have air sovereignty over Venice. Yes, they do. They already fly their stupid airships much too low over our city as it is. That Prince Eugene and the Archduke Maximilian Franz and the Empress Maria Theresia and the Archduchess Maria Amalia”—and with each name he struck the table leg with his cane—“and the Grand Duke Leopold and the Kaiser Joseph and the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm and the Kaiser Franz and whatever the names of all those Habsburg cretins were…”

  “Enzo,” his wife pleaded, tugging at his sleeve, but he seemed to be firmly e
mbedded in concrete next to our table.

  “They don’t do that for fun,” he asserted emphatically. “They want to humiliate us once again. You don’t believe it, young woman? Let me tell you: That ridiculous face over Murano has got to go! Or else we’ll all pay the price.”

  He slammed his cane into the cement floor and trudged with a grimly raised chin to the door.

  “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” his wife whispered apologetically, hurrying after him.

  We watched the two of them leave, and when the door had closed, everyone burst out laughing. People turned back to their tables.

  “That’s Enzo,” said the owner, wiping the tears from the corners of his eyes.

  The tufts of thick hair sprouting from his shoulders and from the pale skin of his neck shone like black steel wool. He smelled of grilled fish, garlic, and sweat.

  “I’m sure Paolo also has fish that have not yet turned into artifacts,” Frans said to me, running his finger down the menu, which lit up at his touch and showed underwater pictures of fishing grounds.

  “I’ll just have a salad,” I declared hastily.

  As Frans carved up his grayling and drizzled lemon over it, he gestured with a nod to my salad, in which I was poking around, and said with a smile: “That won’t protect you from breaking your teeth—on the contrary. The nanos were actually developed for plant tissue, to turn decaying wood into synthetic resin.”

  I put aside the utensils. “Do you want to completely spoil my appetite?” I asked him.

  “Sorry. That was thoughtless of me. You need not be afraid, Domenica. Gastric acid destroys them. It’s even more harmful to them than coldness.”

  “Is that why that ice barrier was built around the city?”

  Frans nodded. “So that the fish in the Adriatic don’t all turn into plastic. But seriously. Only with those tailor-made little machines can this city be saved. With them the millions of tree trunks that were rammed into the caranto are to be turned into solid synthetic resin pillars, which will last for a few millennia. If the experiment fails, Venice will go under.”

  “Apparently, that comes at a price.”

  He shrugged and looked around uneasily.

  “What was the story with the boy?” I asked.

  “That happened over in the Giardini,” Frans explained in a soft voice. “The boy was about twelve. He had gotten something in his eye while swimming and cried out in pain. Then he lost consciousness. Before they had gotten him to the eye clinic in Vicenza, all that was left of the eye was slime, and before they had prepared him for emergency surgery, the boy was dead. When they opened the skull during the autopsy, the brain was nothing but a crumbly mass—like old Stilton cheese. That mutant had multiplied explosively in the vitreous and had entered the brain via the tissue of the optic nerve. They immediately cremated the corpse and quarantined everyone who had had anything to do with him. The whole area was in a state of agitation. Thank God nothing like that has happened again since.”

  “There’s one thing I don’t understand: These nanos are machines. How can they mutate?” I asked.

  “Don’t be fooled by the term ‘machine,’” Frans explained. “At this scale, organic and inorganic structures behave the same way. It’s a sort of molecular mechanics on the basis of electric charge distributions; the functions are identical in both cases—and the malfunctions too. That’s why it would be a catastrophic mistake to use nanos in the radioactively contaminated areas of Central Europe, as people are always demanding. It would be an absolute disaster! That would result in more than just a few plastic fish. Killer mutants would burst forth and run amok, which we would be powerless to oppose.” He drained his glass. “The NNTR is in the process of developing improved emergency brakes, but there are limits to that. And with such programs malfunctions can occur. Matter is simply something elastic, mutable. And that goes even more for living matter, or else there would be no life. But I don’t need to tell you that.”

  I pointed to the napkin with the dying fish.

  “What does such an emergency brake look like in this case?” I asked. “After all, you have to be able to pull it before an afflicted organism escapes into the oceans.”

  “A suicide program. A sort of apoptosis, programmed cell death.”

  Frans placed his wrist flat on the table and slid back the protective cover of his Scarabeo, opened a program, and turned on the holoprojection.

  “Here you have the record of an emergency braking,” he explained, as a small chart appeared and filled up with signs. “In purely statistical terms, between a thousand and ten thousand mutations occur per second in a cubic yard of water. Depending on environmental conditions.”

  “So many?”

  “That’s a very low percentage. You have to consider that in a cubic yard of lagoon water, about sixty to eighty billion lins are active.”

  “Lins?”

  “Long-term stable intelligent nano structures, as the techs call their fancy little machines. The mutation is expressed in faulty readings during the structure recognition in the molecular architecture. The breakdown is caused by toxins in the water: industrial effluent from Mestre, fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, plasticizers, detergents; on top of that, there’s solar radiation in the UV range, penetrating cosmic rays, radioactivity.

  “Here you can identify an emerging mutant. First error clusters form: the tector, the little nano machine, no longer clearly recognizes its tectoplast—what it is supposed to reshape. Here you see the error accumulation shooting up—exponentially. The error clusters expand explosively. It has mutated to the extent that it mistakes an incorrect tectoplast for the correct one and reshapes it—as in the case of our fish. That’s why, before it reaches that point, the suicide program must be activated. Schematically, that looks like this.”

  In the holograph appeared a bright red scrolling script.

  ⇐ TECTOPLAST NEGATIVE

  → ERROR

  ⇒ TECTOPLAST NEGATIVE

  → ERROR—ERROR

  ⇐ TECTOPLAST NEGATIVE

  → ERROR—ERROR—ERROR

  ⇐ TECTOPLAST NEGATIVE

  → ERRORCLUSTER—ESCAPE!

  ⇐ TECTOPLAST POSITIVE NEGATIVE POSITIVE NEGATIVE

  → ERRORCLUSTER EXPONENTIAL—ESCAPE! ESCAPE!

  ⇓ ESCAPE

  ⇓ EXCAPE

  ⇓ EXIAPE

  ⇓ EXIAUS

  ⇓ EXITUS

  ⇓ EXIT

  ⇓ EX

  ⇓ …

  ⇐ REPROGRAMMING?

  → FAILED

  ⇐ EXITUS

  → POSITIVE

  “That’s the schema, but of course this dialogue is conducted in the molecular language of chemistry. That alone is comprehensible to the tectors,” Frans explained.

  In the meantime, the restaurant was almost completely full. Some patrons were looking over at us with curiosity. Frans turned off his Scarabeo and lifted the napkin in which the mutated fish was wrapped. The mouth was still opening and closing as if in extreme slow motion. You had to look really closely to perceive the movement. The golden shimmer now covered almost the whole body. Only the ugly head still had its reddish color. Even the shed blood had a golden finish.

  “In this case the suicide program failed,” I noted.

  Frans shrugged and replied: “The mutant would still have to surmount the ice barrier and the floodgates of the lagoon to make it into the open sea.”

  “Is there a danger that it could succeed?”

  “The chances are extremely slim. The alternative would be a comprehensive killing program. That would mean destroying quadrillions of good hardworking nanos that had done nothing wrong. Mass murder. And the project would be set back months. The fishermen should finally stop casting nets in the lagoon. The city rented expensive fishing grounds beyond the litorali to compensate them.”

  Paolo, who was just passing the table after taking an order, stopped. He must have heard what Frans had just been saying, for he pursed his lips with amuse
ment, gestured with a nod to the fish in the napkin and said: “I’ll bring you a clean plastic bag in a moment. Then you can take your gift with you. I forgot to tell you, my friend: It was caught south of Sottomarina, below the third sluice, near the mouth of the Adige.”

  Frans glanced at me and puffed out his cheeks. “Oh, shit,” he whispered.

  When we left, the grandfather clock still indicated that it was a quarter to six.

  “It stopped,” I said.

  Frans cast a glance at it. “Yes, but that was a hundred years ago.”

  * * *

  ON THE RIALTO dock, Frans fished a pair of rolled-up plastic boots out of his shoulder bag and pulled them over his shoes and pants.

  “You have to get these,” he said. “The most important piece of equipment here. At night, the streets are usually flooded.”

  “Despite the Lido Dam?”

  “For more than fifty years the system of locks has been a matter of dispute. At the same time, the level of the Adriatic has been continuously rising for a hundred years. Acqua alta—the people here have learned to live with that. But it’s getting more and more dicey. The Gibraltar Dam Project was vetoed by Indonesia and Japan, and ever since the south of Bangladesh and the Maldives had to be evacuated, it hasn’t had a chance of even making it onto the global political agenda. So the hydraulic engineers here are running out of time. At the same time, the lagoon is equipped with an ingenious system of gates, the so-called Moses Project. It dates back to last century, in the eighties. The lagoon can be sealed off automatically from the high waters by remote-controlled modules, but it has to be regularly flooded, or else it would die away, and Venice would be swamped with rot and muck. Acqua alta or acqua morte are the alternatives. So the attempt is being made to maneuver between them. And the opening to the Adriatic holds its dangers, as you can see.” He raised the plastic bag with the fish. “A filtration system for nanos—such a thing will never exist. They’re too small for that. Only the chemical cudgel. And that often strikes the ones nearby too.”

  Campo San Bartolo was knee-deep under water. Frans stuffed the plastic bag into his shoulder bag, grasped me around the waist, and lifted me onto the wooden walkway that ran along the facades of the houses and on which people could reach Calle Stagneri without getting their feet wet, as he sloshed through the water next to me.